One of the resources for the formation of deacons and other ordained clergy is the competency grid, that is, a grid or table that provides a full list of the knowledge, abilities, qualifications, and behaviour required to perform a specific role as well as proficiency levels. This tool can help identify the current competencies of the deacon, and the desired competency levels for the future. This can then be acted upon by deciding what further education and training may be needed.

Such competency grids have been compiled to assist in the selection, growth, lifelong learning and support of ordained clergy in their work. They are now used in many provinces and dioceses, particularly in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. They usually take a staged approach, identifying particular expectations for selection time, ordination, and for lifelong learning after ordination.

Such ministry competency grids do of course mimic the lists widely used in the business and industry training world. So some cautions have to be expressed about them and their validity.

In considering using competency grids it needs to be understood that they reflect a tendency in secular education and training that became very influential in the late 20th century. The term ‘competence’ was originally associated with vocational training and skills development rather than understanding. Competence is concerned with what people do rather than with what they know and it always has a context which exists in time (one never does something in abstract but always in a context at a particular time). To reliably measure someone’s ability to do something there must be clearly defined outcomes and standards by which achievement or performance of those outcomes is measured and accredited.

Though there are many complicated definitions of competence in education and training textbooks most of the definitions acknowledge that competence has three main components, knowledge, skill and attitude:

• Knowledge means having the information and understanding required to perform a task.
• Skill involves the ability and strength to actually perform a task and not just talk or write about it.
• Attitude means having the necessary confidence, will, and motivation to perform a task. For example, if a worker does not have the confidence to complete a task, he or she is not really competent at that specific task.

The advocacy arguments for a competency-based approach are the following:

• there is coherence and clarity in what has to be taught and learned
• learning is measurable and, at least in principle, easy to assess
• competencies are more easily transferred from one context to another
• does not prescribe any one teaching approach.

Criticisms of the competency approach are that it:

• focuses too much on observable work
• competencies tend to be too generic
• meshes uneasily with academic education
• assumes that everyone is homogenous and needs the same basic skills and performance outcomes
• assumes a person is either competent or incompetent/deficient – nothing in between
• tends to be narrowly conceived and has an inadequate conceptualisation of human activity (in that it ignores many human qualities and wider notions of knowledge and understanding – for example, can a quality such as empathy be defined and taught?)
• arbitrarily divides up the holistic nature of a practice.

Latterly, there have been attempts to see competencies more holistically and almost as habits, as the Church of England’s 2021 Formation Framework IME 2 for Ordained Distinctive Diaconal Ministry puts it, “we have moved away from Criteria which are to be met to Qualities to be inhabited”, but these attempts merely mitigate the fundamental training world approach.

Here are a number of such competency grids for deacons, transitional deacons, priests, bishops and theological education institutions.

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